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Educational Inclusion and Critical Neuroscience: Friends Or Foes?

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Educational Inclusion and Critical Neuroscience: Friends Or Foes? International Journal of Inclusive Education ISSN: 1360-3116 (Print) 1464-5173 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tied20 Educational inclusion and critical neuroscience: friends or foes? Tom Billington To cite this article: Tom Billington (2017): Educational inclusion and critical neuroscience: friends or foes?, International Journal of Inclusive Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603116.2017.1283717 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1283717 © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 02 Feb 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 165 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tied20 Download by: [University of Sheffield] Date: 20 February 2017, At: 08:26 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INCLUSIVE EDUCATION, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1283717 Educational inclusion and critical neuroscience: friends or foes? Tom Billington School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Momentum is continuing to grow in the circulation of neuroscientific Received 19 July 2016 discourse, informing aspects of how we live but affecting too how we Accepted 30 November 2016 think about education and learning. Neurologically informed intrusions KEYWORDS into education frequently align with psychology which has until now ‘ ’ Inclusive education; critical largely adopted a medical model , supporting policies and practices and affective neuroscience; which ultimately invoke psychopathology and arguably render individual critical educational young people more vulnerable to various forms of social and educational psychology exclusion. This paper urges caution in respect of understandings of educational neuroscience that focus on individual deficits and diagnoses. Rather it holds in mind the broader historical context for neuroscience and its implications for our understandings of what it is to be human in the twenty first century and thereafter for education and learning. Theoretical resources from critical and affective neuroscience but also critical educational psychology are brought together specifically to support the principles of inclusionist policies and practices in education. The emergence of a ‘neuro-’ world The twenty first century has been popularly referred to as the ‘century of the brain’, evidenced by major initiatives such as BRAIN in the United States (White House 2013), which was a Presidential focus on gaining an understanding of the human brain, and by the €1.19 billion Human Brain Pro- ject (2012) which is being funded by the European Union. The vast resources martialed in the pursuit of knowledge concerning our most mysterious organ suggest that we are approaching a moment in history when age-old philosophical questions about human mind could finally be resolved. Given the ‘increasing asymmetries in funding between the neuro- and social sciences’ (Kraus 2015, 101), it is presumably imagined that any answers will be provided by a particular kind of scientific endeavour (i.e. positivist). Neuroscience is being bankrolled by governments to provide these answers supported by an array of institutional shifts and networks (OECD 2002), for example, the Society for Neuro- science regularly boasts attendances of over 30,000 at its annual conference. This paper is a response to the extraordinary growth but is written specifically for researchers, policy-makers and prac- titioners who are committed primarily to the principles of educational and social inclusion. While this is an exploratory theoretical paper, its motivation and methodology stems from con- sideration of both research and practice. The increasing significance of neurologically informed dis- course in relation to human development and education has been apparent for some years when supervising research students and trainee psychologists and teachers at the University and also in the requests for advice and training received from schools and Education Authorities. Additional impetus for the paper, however, comes not only from an emerging literature in both affective and CONTACT Tom Billington [email protected] © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 T. BILLINGTON critical neuroscience but also from fieldwork experience, gained initially as a secondary teacher and subsequently for many years as a psychologist working at the boundaries of exclusion with schools, families and in the family courts (Billington 2000, 2006). Neuro-discourse has been on the increase in each of these settings. Neuroscience introduced itself into education and educational psychology in accordance with a cognitivist paradigm and began to distill a knowledge about the brain, as it were, in order to educate the educators (Goswami 2004; Blakemore and Frith 2005). There have been special editions – Jour- nal of Philosophy of Education (Cigman and Davis 2008), Educational and Child Psychology (Cole, Resing, and Gibbs 2016) – and new Journals too – Educational Neuroscience, Mind, Brain & Edu- cation – while claims are made in education training packages concerning the neurological basis for all learning and behaviour (e.g. Jensen 2008; Kelly 2016) together with a range of registered pro- ducts and commercial teaching materials. In the UK, the Royal Society, aware perhaps of both the opportunity and the concerns regarding the expansion of the new science, attempted to bring some order to the fast-emerging field of edu- cation and neuroscience, drew attention to some of the risks involved and made recommendations (Brainwaves Module 2: Neuroscience – implications for education and lifelong learning, Royal Society 2011). While there had been earlier reports linking education and neuroscience, for example, the Blue Brain Project (EPFL 2005), the Brain Waves reports were seminal in mapping out the potential future impact of neuroscience upon education. Interestingly, however, the core principle cited in the second Brain Waves report recommended that ‘knowledge needs to go both ways’ (RS 2011, 33), not just from neuroscience towards other disciplines but from those disciplines back into neuroscience. The authors extolled the virtues of finding a shared conceptual space, in particular, a ‘common language and bridge between educators, psychologists and neuroscientists’ (RS 2011, iii), and of a ‘better knowledge exchange between scientists and practitioners’ (RS 2011, 1). The ways in which this common language was to be achieved and in which language and ideas might flow the other way, from educational practitioners and policy-makers to neuroscience, were not explored, and although there have been attempts to mediate (Howard-Jones 2008; Mason 2009) there are likely to be many educators and social scientists who are wary of accepting an a priori biological or cog- nitivist brain discourse (Bruer 1997; Davis 2004). Neuroscientific discourse is permeating many areas of social life and it can be argued that its widespread distribution is beginning to threaten the range of means by which we can represent or conceptualise ‘human’. There is a power invested in neuro-knowledge which is infiltrating socio-cul- tural forms of expression and beginning to challenge any opposition. At its most extreme, it is becoming possible to conclude that other means of representing ‘human’, in spaces free from neuro- logical discourse, are diminishing and that all counter-discourses will be de-stabilised. Resistance might almost seem futile in the face of an inevitable and determinist imperative that we are nothing but brains with the eventual consequence in the social sciences that ‘the prefix neuro- has won its final battle … it has conquered critique itself’ (De Vos and Pluth 2015, 22). It has been suggested that the ways in which neuroscientific discourse potentially undermines other forms of knowledge might constitute a wider social danger, for example, by restricting agency in the area of social justice with serious consequences for our understanding of educational inclusion. The power of neurologi- cally informed accounts of the person could even be a ‘threat to civic society’ (De Vos 2016a). Despite the growth of neuro-discourse, however, ‘brain-based’ approaches to learning are still struggling to gain widespread purchase in educational practice beyond the by now customary preface ‘neuroscience tells us [this or that] …’which is becoming a regular feature of service and practitioner training. I argue that any reluctance on the part of educators to accept such materials is well-founded since it is difficult so far to pinpoint individual ‘discoveries’ from neuroscientific research relating to learning, behaviour or education for which the underlying concept or principle has not already been articulated or established elsewhere in the history of human or social science, for example, in biology, psychology or sociology or indeed philosophy or educational research. Neuroscience in education currently seems merely to be corroborating
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